This is our list of the top 10 most gay friendly countries in the world. We based our research on the following 4 studies and combined this with our personal experience of having travelled to over 100 countries as a gay couple:

To be clear, we are looking at countries overall, not cities or regions. So for example, whilst the US has some of the gayest destinations in the world (San Francisco, the Keys, Fire Island etc) it also has so much extreme homophobia, which makes it difficult to rank it in our top 10.

In our opinion, gay marriage for us is the first and most important marker to measure how gay friendly a country is because we think that a government making the proactive stance to go from having civil unions to the symbolic step of saying “we’re all equal and we’re going to call it marriage” is a big deal! The only exception we made for this is Thailand – a destination we’ve always felt extremely welcome in as a gay couple, despite it not having equal marriage laws. Here are our top 10 gay friendliest countries in the world.